A Mess by Any Other Name

   One of my frequent sayings is:  There are no failures in the kitchen, only alternative names.  By this I mean that the pie that crumbles to pieces when you attempt to serve it should now be called cobbler.  The bread that refuses to rise becomes pita bread. Not to mention Cajun cooking, which opened endless possibilities with the term blackened.  Even recipes that do turn out, like casseroles, benefit from being given a foreign name like pastisto, or goulash.
    I am wondering if I can use similar creative packaging to beautify my increasing aversion to house cleaning.  I have gone from cleaning weekly to cleaning weakly, from thorough cleaning to "lick and a promise cleaning" to "promise only" (who wants to lick?).  Yesterday I noticed a small clump of Maynard hair on the carpet.  I had two choices:  1) vacuum the entire carpet which, no doubt, needed it  2) discard the wad of hair.  My choice of  the latter option seems indicative my new philosophy.  It would not be quite honest to use the expression "less is more" so I propose "less is enough".  A more contemporary expression would be--minimalist maintenance.
   This is where the use of creative names comes in.  Now that distressed furniture is popular, perhaps the cat footprints I haven't yet detracked from my leather bench could be considered "pet customized".  The dog hair on the carpet could be natural fiber insulation. Another helpful phrase is frosted glass, whose possibilities I discovered by chance when, months after moving into our previous home, I learned the chandelier globes were actually frosted with a layer of dust.  The secret of frosted glass is consistency, sporadic dusting ruins the illusion.  I could even label my home as environmentally friendly, since bits of the environment are tracked throughout my house.  The word faux could cover a multitude of cleaning deficits, for instance, fingerprints could be considered faux texture.
    Pessimists are defined as seeing the glass as half empty, optimists see it as half full, people who see the glass as clean enough are usually called bachelors.  But, since I am long married, I choose to coin the term  adequists or, for picky people who insist on real words, taxonomists. There are no failures in my house cleaning, what I lack in diligence, I make up for in vocabulary.  "A mess, by any other name, would smell. . .?"